As she neared the road, a grey Jaguar passed by with Stephen Collier behind the wheel. He slowed down at the intersection, and Katie became flustered. She half raised her hand to wave, but dropped it quickly.
Stephen didn’t acknowledge her presence at all; he seemed to be looking right through her. At first she told herself he hadn’t seen her, but she knew he had. Perhaps he was thinking of something else and hadn’t noticed his surroundings. She often walked around in a daze like that herself. The blood ran to her face as she crossed the road and hurried on to the shops.
‘Afternoon, Katie love,’ Mrs Thetford greeted her. ‘A bit late today, aren’t you? Still, I’ve saved you some nice Brussels sprouts.’
Katie thanked her and paid, her mind still on Stephen Collier. Why had he called last night when he knew Sam was out? Katie couldn’t understand his desire to talk to her about his problems, or his apparent concern for her.
‘Your change, dearie!’ Mrs Thetford called after her.
Katie walked back to the counter and held out her hand, smiling. ‘I’d forget my head if it was loose.’
She called at the butcher’s and bought some pork loin chops, the best he had left, then turned back towards home. Stephen really had sounded as if he needed a friend. He had been tired, burdened. Katie regretted letting him down, but what else could she have done? She couldn’t be his friend; she didn’t know how.
Besides, it wasn’t right.
She noticed the speeding Mini just in time to dodge it and crossed the green again. A few people, mostly old women, sat on the benches nattering, and a light breeze rustled the new pale green leaves on the trees.
What Stephen had said about her being unhappy was true. Was it so obvious to everyone, or did he really sense a bond between them? Surely with all his money and success he couldn’t be unhappy too.
Katie tried to remember when she had last been happy, and thought of the first weeks in Swainshead. It had been hard work, fixing up the house, but they had done it. And what’s more, they had done it together.
After that though, when everything was ready, Sam left the running of it all to her. It was as if he’d finished his life’s work and settled into early retirement.
‘Ideas above his station,’ her granny had always said of Sam. And sure enough, no sooner were they in residence than he was off to the White Rose ingratiating himself with the locals. As soon as he found out that the Colliers, who owned the big house over the road, were the dale’s wealthiest and most powerful family, there was no stopping him. But give him his due, Katie thought, he never fawned or lowered himself; he just seemed to act as if he’d found his natural place in the order at last. Why they accepted him, if indeed they did, she had no idea.
When she wasn’t busy running the guest house, Katie became an adornment, something for Sam to hang on his arm at the summer garden parties. She was a kind of Cinderella for whom the ball was always ending. But unlike the fairy-tale character, Katie hated both her roles. She had no love for gowns and glass slippers. Finery, however stylish and expensive, made her feel cheap and sinful. Once, a workmate fortunate enough to go on holiday to Paris had brought her back a pretty green silk scarf. Her granny had snipped it into pieces and scattered them like spring leaves into the fire.
Perhaps, though Katie hated to admit it, she had last been truly happy when her grandmother died. She and Sam hadn’t seen much of the old woman after they went to live with his parents in Armley. They visited her in hospital though, where she lay dying of cancer of the colon, bearing all the pain and humiliation with the same hard courage as she had suffered life. She lay there, silver head against the white pillow, and would accept no comfort for what ‘God’s Will’ was gracing her with. It was almost, Katie thought, as if she had found true joy in the final mutiny of the flesh, of its very cells, as if dying was proof to her that life on earth really was nothing but a vale of tears. But that couldn’t be true, Katie realized, for her granny had never taken pleasure in anything in her life.
Katie fainted at her funeral and then gagged on the brandy the minister gave her to bring her round. Now all she had left of Granny was the heavy wooden cross on the living-room mantelpiece. A bare dark cross, with no representation of the crucified Christ (for such things smelled too much of popish idolatry for Granny), it symbolized perfectly the harsh arid life the old woman had chosen for herself and her granddaughter. Katie hated the thing, but she hadn’t been able to pluck up the courage to throw it out.
Outbreaks of boils and plagues of locusts would surely follow such a blasphemous act.
So Stephen Collier was right - she was unhappy. There was nothing anyone could do about it though, except perhaps… But no. She had a terrible feeling of apprehension about the future, certain that her only possible escape route was cut off now. Why she should feel that way she didn’t know, but everyone was behaving oddly again - Stephen, Sam, John Fletcher. Could it really be a coincidence that Anne Ralston’s name had been mentioned to her again so recently? And that so soon after it had come up, there had been another murder in the village?
Shuddering as if someone had just stepped over her grave, Katie walked back up the path and into the house to get on with cleaning the rooms.
THREE
After leaving the lab, Banks first drove into Wetherby and bought an A to Z street atlas of Leeds. He knew the city reasonably well, but had never been to Armley, where Allen’s sister lived. He studied the area and planned a route over lunch in a small pub off the main street, where he ate a rather soupy lasagne and drank an excellent pint of Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter.
He listened to the Donovan tape as he drove. Those old songs certainly brought back memories. Why did the past always seem so much brighter than the present? Because he had been more innocent then? Surely every childhood summer couldn’t have been as sunny as he recalled. There must have been long periods of rain, just as there always seemed to be these days. What the hell, he thought, humming along with ‘Teen Angel’ as he drove - today’s beautiful, enjoy the sun while it’s here. Most of all, he wanted to put out of his mind for as long as possible what he would soon have to tell Bernard Allen’s sister.
He lit a cigarette and turned on to the Leeds Inner Ring Road, which skirted the city centre by a system of yellow-lit tunnels affording occasional flashes into the open and glimpses of church spires, tower blocks and rows of dark terraced houses. It still felt warm, but the sun was now only a blurred pearl behind a thin grey gauze of cloud.
He came out on to Wellington Road, by the Yorkshire Post building, then crossed the River Aire and, immediately afterwards, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.
There had been a great deal of development in the area, and one or two very colourful red-and-gold barges stood moored by the quay. But the river and canal banks were still very much of a wasteland: overgrown with weeds, littered with the tyres and old prams people had dumped there.
Many of the huge Victorian warehouses still hung on, crumbling and broken-windowed, their red brick blackened by the industrial smoke of a hundred years or more. It was a little like the Thames, Banks thought, where old wharfs and warehouses, like the warrens where Fagin had run his band of child-thieves, were daily being converted into luxury apartment complexes, artists’ studios and office space. Because Leeds was in the depressed and abandoned North though, the process of regeneration would probably take quite a bit longer, if indeed it ever happened at all.
Skilfully navigating the lanes of traffic and a huge roundabout, Banks managed to get on Armley Road.
Soon he was at the bottom of Town Street, where the road swung right, past the park, to Bramley and Stan-ningley. He turned left up Crab Lane, a narrow winding one-way street by a small housing estate built on a hill, and parked on the street near the library.
Banks soon found Esther Haines’s house. It had a blue door, freshly painted by the look of it. In the garden was an overturned plastic tricycle, green with thick yellow wheels.
&nbs
p; Banks pressed the bell and a thin-faced woman answered. She was perhaps in her late twenties, but she seemed haggard and tired. Judging from the noise inside the house, Banks guessed that the cares of motherhood had worn her down. She frowned at him and he showed her his identification card.
Immediately, she turned pale and invited him in. For people on estates like this, Banks realized, a visit from the police always means bad news. He felt his stomach muscles tighten as he walked inside.
In the living room, cluttered with children’s toys, Mrs Haines had already sat down. Hands clasped in her lap, she perched on the edge of her seat on the sofa. A dark-haired man came through from the kitchen, and she introduced him as her husband, Les. He was wearing only vest and trousers. His shoulders and chest were matted with thick black hair, and he had a tattoo of a butterfly on his right bicep.
‘We were just having our tea,’ Esther Haines said. ‘Les is on the night shift at the yeast factory.’
‘Aye,’ her husband said, pulling up a chair and facing Banks aggressively. ‘What’s all this about?’
A child with jam smeared all over his pale grinning face crawled through the open kitchen door and busied himself trying to tear apart a fluffy toy dog.
‘I’m sorry,’ Banks said, ‘but I’ve got some bad news for you.’
And the rest followed as it always did: disbelief, denial, shock, tears and finally a kind of numb acceptance. Banks was relieved to see that the first thing Mr Haines did was light a cigarette. He followed suit. Esther clutched a handkerchief to her nose. Her husband went to make tea and took the child with him.
After Mr Haines had brought in the teapot and cups, leaving the child to play in the kitchen, Banks leaned forward in his seat and said to Esther, ‘There are some questions I’ve got to ask.’
She nodded. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Are you sure it’s our Bernie?’
‘As sure as we can be at this point,’ Banks told her. He didn’t want to have to tell her what state her brother’s corpse had been in. ‘Your answers will help us a lot. When did you last see him?’
‘It was a couple of weeks ago, now,’ she said. ‘He stayed with us a week.’
‘Can you find out the exact date he left here, Mrs Haines? It’s important.’
Her husband walked over to a calendar of Canadian scenes and ran a stubby finger along the squares. ‘It was the thirteenth,’ he said, then looked over at Esther. ‘Remember, love, that morning he went to the dentist’s for that filling he needed?’
Mrs Haines nodded.
‘Did he leave immediately after his visit to Mr Jarrett’s?’
‘Yes,’ said Les Haines. ‘He was heading for the Dales, so he had to be off about eleven. He was after taking one of them trains on the Settle-Carlisle route.’
‘And that was the last time either of you saw him, at eleven o’clock on May the thirteenth?’
They both nodded.
‘Do you know where he was going?’
‘Of course,’ Esther said. ‘He were off back to Swainshead.’
‘Going back? I don’t understand. Is that where he was before he came to stay with you?’
‘No, it’s where he grew up; it’s where we used to live.’
Now Banks remembered where he’d heard the name before. Allen. Nicholas Collier had directed Gristhorpe and himself to the ruins of Archie Allen’s old farmhouse high on the side of Swainshead Fell.
‘Is your father Archie Allen?’ he asked.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘And you lived on the fell side, worked a farm?’
‘Until it went belly up,’ Mr Haines cut in.
‘Did you live there too?’ Banks asked him.
‘Me? No. Leeds born and bred. But the missus grew up there.’
‘How long ago was this, Mrs Haines?’ Banks asked Esther, who had started weeping quietly again.
‘It’s ten years since we moved, now.’
‘And you came straight here?’
‘Not until Les and I got married. We lived in an old back-to-back off Tong Road. It’s not far away. Dad got a job at Blakey’s Castings. It were all he could get. Then they went to Melbourne - Australia, like - to go and live with our Denny after they retired. Oh God, somebody’ll have to tell Mum and Dad.’ She looked beseechingly at her husband, who patted her arm. ‘Don’t worry about that, love,’ he said. ‘It’ll keep a while.’
‘As far as I can gather,’ Banks said when Mrs Haines had regained her composure, ‘your brother had some connection with Toronto in Canada. Is that right?’
She nodded. ‘He couldn’t get a job over here. He was a bright lad, our Bernie. Got a degree. But there was no jobs. He emigrated eight years ago.’
‘What did he do in Toronto?’
‘He’s a teacher in a college. Teaching English. It’s a good job. We was off out to see him next year.’
Banks lit another cigarette as she wiped away the tears and blew her nose.
‘Can you give me his address?’
She nodded and said, ‘Be a love, Les.’ Her husband went to the sideboard and brought out a tattered Wool-worth’s address book.
‘How often did Bernard come home?’ Banks asked, writing down the Toronto address.
‘Well, he came as often as he could. This was his third trip, but he hadn’t been for four years. Proper homesick he was.’
‘Why did he stay in Canada, then?’
She shrugged. ‘Money. No work for him here, is there? Not with Thatcher running the country.’
‘What did he talk about while he was with you?’
‘Nothing really. Just family things.’
‘Did he say anything odd to you, Mr Haines? Anything that struck you as unusual?’
‘No. We didn’t talk a lot. We’d not much in common really. I’m not a great reader, never did well at school. And he liked his books, did Bernie. We talked about ale a bit. About what the boozers are like over there. He told me he’d found a nice pub in Toronto where he could get John Smith’s and Tartan on draught.’
‘Is that all?’
Haines shrugged. ‘Like I said, we didn’t have much in common.’
Banks turned to Mrs Haines again. ‘What state of mind was he in? Was he upset about anything, depressed?’
‘He’d just got divorced about a year ago,’ she said, ‘and he were a bit upset about that. I think that’s what made him homesick. But I wouldn’t say he were really depressed, no. He seemed to think he might be able to come back and live here again before too long.’
‘Did he say anything about a job?’
‘No.’
‘How could he manage to move back here then?’
Esther Haines shook her head. ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. He just hinted. Maybe it were wishful thinking, like, now he didn’t have Barbara any more.’
‘That was his wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘What happened between them?’
‘She ran off wi’ another man.’
‘Where had Bernie been before he visited you?’
Esther took a deep breath and dabbed at her red eyes. ‘He’d come to England for a month, all told,’ she said. ‘First off, he spent a week seeing friends in London and Bristol, then he came up here. He’d be due to go back about now, wouldn’t he, Les?’
‘Do you know how to get in touch with these friends?’ Banks asked.
She shook her head. ‘Sorry. They were friends of Bernie’s from university.’
‘Which university?’
‘York.’
‘And you didn’t know them?’
‘No. They’d be in his notebook. He always carried a notebook full of names and stuff.’
‘We didn’t find it. Never mind, we’ll find them somehow.’ If necessary, Banks knew he could check with the university authorities and track down Bernard Allen’s contemporaries. ‘Do you know where he was heading after Swainshead?’
‘He were going to see another friend in Edinburgh, then fly
back from Prestwick. You can do that with Wardair, he said, fly to London and go back from somewhere else.’ She put her handkerchief to her nose again and sniffed.
‘I don’t suppose you have this person’s address in Edinburgh?’
She shook her head.
‘So,’ Banks said, stubbing out his cigarette and reaching for the tea, ‘he left here on May the thirteenth to do some fell-walking in the Dales, and then-’
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